Our Army at the Front

And within three months after this time he had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in France, the Navy Department having accomplished the astounding feat of transporting 637,929 in April, May, and June. The month that the reinforcement of the French and British Armies was planned and accepted the transport figures jumped from forty-eight thousand odd to eighty-three thousand odd. The month of its first practical operation the figures jumped again to one hundred and seventeen thousand odd, and in the month of June, the month of the anniversary of the first debarkation, there was a transportation of 276,372 men.

The last few days of March, 1918, saw the first large troop movements from the American zone – that is, saw them strictly in the mind's eye. Actually, the rain came down in such drenching downpours that the French villagers whom the motor-trucks passed did not so much see as hear the doughboys. Throughout the whole zone the activity was prodigious. Along the muddy roads two great processions of motor-trucks crossed each other day and night, the one taking the soldiers to one front, the other to another. Sometimes the camions slithered in the mud till they came to a stop in the gutter. Then the boisterous, jubilant soldiers would tumble out and set their shoulders under wheels and mud-guards, and hoist the car into the road again. The singing was incessant. The mood of the songs swung from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night."

The exuberance of the soldiers knew no bounds. They were about to answer "present" to the roll-call of the big guns, the call they had been hearing for so many months, that had seemed to them so persistently and personally compelling. They were going to become a part of that living wall which for three years and a half had held the enemy out of Paris.

Those who were going to the British front were particularly exultant because they expected to find open fighting there, the kind they called "our specialty."

To all the units going into the French and British Armies a general order was read, jacking up discipline to the topmost notch.

"The character of the service this command is now about to undertake," read the order, "demands the enforcement of stricter discipline and the maintenance of higher standards of efficiency than any heretofore required.

"In future the troops of this command will be held at all times to the strictest observance of that rigid discipline in camp and on the march which is essential to their maximum efficiency on the day of battle."

The first of the fighting troops arrived on the British front on the morning of April 10, after an all-night march. They were grimed and mud-spattered, hungry, and tired, and cold. But the cheering that rose from the Tommies when they recognized the American uniforms at the head of the column would have revived more exhausted men than they.

The first comers were infantry, a battalion of them. Others came up during the day, with artillerymen and machine-gunners. The celebration of their coming lasted far into the next night, and the commanders of the British front exchanged telegrams of congratulation with the commanders of the French front that they were to be so welcomely refreshed.

But Generalissimo Foch, with his stanch determination not to be done out of his reserve, held the Americans back, and they were destined to remain behind the main battle-line for three and a half months longer.

Meanwhile the American strength was piling steadily up in the reserve, and in mid-May a large contingent of the National Army, said to be the first of them to land in Europe, reached the Flanders front and began to train at once behind the British lines, without preliminary work in American camps in France.

These men had what was probably the most exhilarating welcome of the war. The Tommies, many of them wounded and sick, poured out into the roadways as the new American Army arrived, and threw their caps into the air and split their throats with cheers. The British had been terrifically hard pressed in the German offensive. They had given ground only after incredible fighting. They were, in the phrase of General Haig, at last "with their backs to the wall." They held their line magnificently, but they could not have been less than filled with thanksgiving that they were now to have the help of the least war-worn of all their allies.

CHAPTER XX

THE FIRST TWO BATTLES

WHILE Generalissimo Foch was strengthening his long line, with American troops as flying buttresses, those sectors delegated to the Americans in their own right saw two battles, within a few weeks of each other, which attained to the dignity of names. The battle of Seicheprey, the first big American defensive action, and the battle of Cantigny, the first big offensive, the one in the Toul sector, the other in Picardy, were the occasions of the American baptism of fire. The one was so valiant, the other so brilliant, and both were so reassuring to the high commands of the Allies, that they would deserve a special emphasis even if they had not the distinction of being America's first battles.

On the night of April 20-21 the German bombardment of Seicheprey, a village east of the Renners wood, and just northwest of Toul, grew to monstrous proportions. Frenchmen who had seen the great Verdun offensive, in which the German Crown Prince had made a new record for artillery preparation, said that the heavy firing on the American sector eclipsed any of the action at Verdun.

The firing covered a front of a mile and a quarter. The bombardment was of high explosive shells and gas, apparently an effort to disable the return fire from American artillery. But all through the night the artillerymen sent their shells, encasing themselves in gas-masks.

Toward dawn the attack began. A full regiment of German soldiers, preceded by 1,200 shock troops, advanced under a barrage. Halfway across No Man's Land the American artillery laid down a counter-barrage, and many of the Germans dropped under it, but still the great waves of them came on, focussing on the village of Seicheprey.

The impact of their terrific numbers was too powerful to be withstood at once. The American troops fell back from some of their first-line trenches, which the first bombardment had caused them to hold loosely, and part of the forces fell back even from the village. The Germans marched into the village, evidently believing it to have been totally abandoned, carrying their flame-throwers and grenades, but making no use of them. Suddenly they discovered that certain American troops had been left to defend the village, while the main force reformed at the rear, and hand-to-hand fighting in the street became necessary. An American commander sent word back that the troops were giving ground by inches, and that they could hold for a few hours.

Seicheprey, the first big American battle, had every element of the World War in little. Before the loss of the village, which occurred about noon, the troops defending it had fought from ambush and in the open, had fought with gas and liquid fire, with grenades, rifles, and machine-guns. In the inferno the new troops were giving proof of valor that was to come out later and be scattered broadcast, as a measure of what America would bring.

In and out of the streets of Seicheprey, in its little public square, from the yards of its houses, hundreds of American soldiers were fighting for their lives. France lay behind them, trusting to be saved. Other Americans were behind them, racing into formation with French troops for the counter-attack. The defenders of Seicheprey, "giving by inches," had a battle-cry of their own, brief and racy, of the football-fields: "Hold 'em."

After a while the Germans took Seicheprey. The hideously pressed, slow-giving outpost moved back. Before the day had finished the shell-stripped streets of Seicheprey, sheltering the invaders, weltered again under the first American shells of the counter-attack. By nightfall the troops were creeping forward under the counter-barrage. The army, reformed, refreshed, and replenished, was on its way to take its own back again. The counter-battle lacked the monstrous gruelling of the first attack. It took less time. The superiority of numbers had shifted to the other side, and the white heat of determination did its share.

The Germans held Seicheprey about four hours.

The main positions of the army, which were threatened, were untouched because of the stoutness of the resistance at the village, and most of the first-line positions were retaken with the rush of the counter-attack.

The German prisoners who were captured had many days' rations in their kits and extra loads of trench-tools on their backs. They had intended to hold the American trenches for several days, facing them the other way, before they commenced the new attack, which, in the plan of the German high command, was to break apart the French and American lines where they joined, above Toul. Once this wedge was into the Allied vitals the rest was to be easy.

Though Seicheprey did not count as a big battle in point of numbers engaged or numbers lost, it loomed large enough in the importance it had strategically. The German high command obviously expected little or nothing from the "green American troops." The shock troops had been rehearsed for weeks to take the American lines and hold them till the Allied line should be broken apart. In fact, it was nobly planned. The only compliment the Americans could squeeze out of it was that the Germans were sent over in many places eight to their one. But the capture of Seicheprey lasted just four hours, and the disruption of the Franco-American line remained a mere brain-child of the Wilhelmstrasse.

The French soldiers who joined the counter-attack told thrilling stories of the Americans. They told that in one place north of Seicheprey, an American detachment was separated into small groups, and was cut off from the company to which it belonged through the entire fight. Behind the Americans and on their left flank were German units, but they could have retired on the right. They decided to stay and fight, so there they stayed, notwithstanding incessant enemy bombardment.

In the town of Seicheprey a squad of Americans found a few cases of hand-grenades. With these they put up a tremendous fight through the whole day, holding to a strip at the northern end of the village. They refused to surrender when they were ordered to, and at the end of the fighting only nine of the original twenty-three were left. By the grace of these nine men Seicheprey was never wholly German, even for the four hours.

One New England boy passed through the enemy barrage seven times to carry ammunition to his comrades. A courier who was twice blown off the road by shell explosions carried his message through and dropped as he reported. A lieutenant with only six men patrolled six hundred yards of the front throughout the day, holding communications open between the battalions to the right and left of him. A sanitary-squad runner captured by the Germans, escaped them and made his way into Seicheprey, tending the wounded there till help came. A machine-gunner found himself alone with his gun, and on being asked by a superior officer if he could hold the line there, replied that he could if he were not killed. He did. A regimental chaplain went to the assistance of a battery which was hard pressed, and carried ammunition for them for hours, then took his turn at the gun.

These make no roster of the heroes of Seicheprey. There were hundreds of them. But the censor's passionate aversion to details of all battles has scotched the narrative of heroes for the present.

Cantigny will warm the cockles of the American heart as long as it beats. There was a battle that for spirit, flare, brilliancy, came up to the rosiest dream that ever was dreamed, in Washington, or London, or Paris.

Cantigny, like Seicheprey, was not an engagement of great numbers. It was a little town that was hard to capture. It commanded a fine view of the American lines for miles back, and it had been able to withstand some violent attempts earlier, so it was particularly desirable. And it was in a salient, so that it formed an angle in the line. Its taking straightened the line, heartily disgruntled the Boches, who lost 200 prisoners and many hundred wounded and dead in defending it, and it gave the American troops their first taste of the offensive. But more than all that, it gave these same troops a record of absolutely flawless workmanship which, if not large, was at least complete.

The capture of Cantigny and 200 yards beyond it, which included the German second line, took just three-quarters of an hour.

In the niggardly terms of the communique: "This morning in Picardy our troops attacked on a front of one and a fourth miles, advanced our lines, and captured the village of Cantigny. We took 200 prisoners and inflicted on the enemy severe losses in killed and wounded. Our casualties were relatively small. Hostile counter-attacks broke down under our fire."

It was on the morning of May 28. At a quarter to six a bombardment began. At a quarter to seven the troops went over the top. The barrage went first, a dense gray veil. Then came twelve French tanks. Just behind the tanks stalked the doughboys.

The soldiers moved like clockwork. There were no unruly fringes to be nipped by the barrage. There was no break in the methodical stride. They went forward first a hundred yards in two minutes. Then the barrage slowed to a hundred yards in four minutes. In a little while the troops had arrived at the edge of the village; then the close-quarter fighting began.

At 7.30 a white rocket rose from the centre of Cantigny, dim against the smoky sky, to tell the men behind that "the objective is reached and prisoners are coming."

The Americans found the enemy in confusion and unreadiness, and the initial resistance from machine-guns at the town's edge was easily overcome. Where the burden of hard fighting came was in routing the Germans out from the caves and tunnels and cellars of the town into which they had retired.

There was a long tunnel in the town, which, after furious fighting, was surrounded and isolated. The flame-throwers were placed at both ends of the tunnel, and that episode was ended. Some of the caves were large enough to hold a battalion. These were handled by the mopping-up troops, who threw hand-grenades.

The prisoners began to file back almost immediately. One grinning Pittsburgher, wounded in the arm, marched in the rear of a prison squad. "That's handin' it to them Huns, blankety-blank 'em," he said cheerfully.

The village caught fire from the bombardment and the firing of the tunnel, and for hours after its capture the soldiers had to fight flames.

The first of the American "shock troops" went from the village on to the German second-line trenches, and under a hail of bullets from German machine-guns dug themselves in and faced the trenches the other way.

All that day they held their prize unmolested. They had all the high ground beyond Cantigny, and an approach was, to put it mildly, precarious. But by five of the afternoon the German counter-attacks had begun. One wave after another stormed half-way up the hill, then tumbled down again, broken under the American artillery. Four counter-attacks were made against Cantigny, but all of them failed. The new positions were consolidated, under heavy fire and gas attack, and there they stayed.

This gallant battle called forth intemperate commendation from the headquarters of the Allies. The French despatch to Washington told officially of the high opinion the French held of it, and there were many congratulatory telegrams from London. The press of London and Paris glowed with praises. The London Evening News wrote:

"Bravo, the young Americans! Nothing in to-day's battle narrative from the front is more exhilarating than the account of their fight at Cantigny. It was clean-cut from beginning to end, like one of their countrymen's short stories, and the short story of Cantigny is going to expand into a full-length novel, which will write the doom of the Kaiser and Kaiserism. We expected it. We have seen those young Americans in London, and merely to glance at them was to know that they are conquerors and brothers in that great Anglo-Saxon-Latin compact which will bring down the Prussian idol… They do not swagger, and they have no war illusions. They have done their first job with swift precision, characteristic of the United States, and Cantigny will one day be repeated a thousand-fold."

The Times wrote:

"Our allies know the significance of that as well as we do. So, too, do the German generals and the German statesmen. It means that the last great factor between autocracy and freedom is coming into effective play on the battle-field… There could be no reflection more heartening for the Allies or more dismaying to their adversaries."

"Their adversaries," meanwhile, were doing what they could to keep their dismay to themselves. In the German announcement of the loss of Cantigny there was mention only of "the enemy." The German people were not to know for a while that the "ridiculous little American Army" had got to work.

CHAPTER XXI

TEUFEL-HUNDEN

NO branch of service in the American Army was so quick to achieve group consciousness as the marines. To be sure, these soldiers of the sea had a considerable tradition behind them before they came to France. The world is never so peaceful that there is nothing for the marines to do. Always there is some spot for them to land and put a situation into hand. It is no fault of the marines that most of these brushes have been little affairs, and they have found, as Mr. Kipling says, that "the things that you learn from the yellow and brown will 'elp you a heap with the white."

The Navy Department has always been careful to preserve the tradition of the marines. The organization has never lacked for intelligent publicity. "First to fight" was a slogan which brought many a recruit into the corps. Even the dreary work of policing, which falls largely to the marines, has been dramatized to a certain extent by that fine swaggering couplet of their song:

"If the army or the navy ever gaze on heaven's scenes,They will find the streets are guarded by United States marines."

The belief that the marines would make a distinctive mark in the great World War was practically unanimous. Army officers couldn't deny it, war correspondents hastened to proclaim it, and the Germans admitted it by bestowing the name "Teufel-hunden" (devil-dogs) on the marines immediately after their first engagement. The marines themselves were second to no one in the consciousness of their own prowess.

"I understand," said a little marine just two days off the transport, "that this Kaiser isn't afraid of the American Army so much, but that he is afraid of the marines."

The boy didn't say whether one of his officers had told him that, but his belief was passionate and complete. However, the marines did not allow their high confidence to interfere in any way with their preparations. They showed the same anxiety to make good on the training-fields that they later displayed on the line. Their camp in the American area was just a bit farther from the centre of things than that of any other organization. Whenever there was a review or a special show of any sort for a distinguished visitor, the marines had to march twelve miles to attend. And after that it was twelve miles home again. But they thrived on hard work. They shot, bayoneted, and bombed just a little better than any other organization in the first division. Sometimes individual marines would complain a little about the fact that they were worked harder than any men in the division, but they always took care to add that they had finished the construction of their practice-trench system days before any of the others. When they mentioned the fact that they had achieved this result by working in day and night shifts it was never possible to tell whether they were airing a grievance or making a boast. It is probable that they were something of the mind of Job, whose boils were both a tribulation and a triumph.

There was no doubt as to the opinion of the marines when it seemed for a time as if they might not get into the fighting. They did not go into the trenches with the first division, but were broken up and sent to various points for police duty. Of course they were bitterly disappointed, but they merely policed a little harder, and it was a severe winter for soldiers who went about with their overcoats unbuttoned, or committed other breaches of military regulations.

Since the marines did hard work well, they were rewarded by more hard work, and this was labor more to their taste. The reward came suddenly. On May 30 a unit of marines was in a training-camp so far back of the lines that it was impossible to hear the sound of the guns even when the Germans turned everything loose for a big offensive. On that same day the Germans reached the Marne east of Château-Thierry and began an advance along the north bank toward the city. That night the marines were ordered to the front.

They rode almost a hundred kilometres to get into the fight. It was late afternoon when they reached a hill overlooking Château-Thierry. French guns all about them were being fired up to their very limit or a little beyond. The Germans were coming on. These marines had never been in a battle before, with the exception of a few who had chased little brown rebels in various brief encounters on small islands. They had never been under shell fire. And this their first engagement was one of the biggest in the greatest war in history. From the hill they could see houses fold up and fields pucker under the pounding of big guns. The marines were told that as soon as darkness came they would march into the town and hold the bridges against the German Army, which was coming on. Somebody asked a French officer some days later how these green troops had taken their experience as they waited the word to go forward. "They were concombres," said the Frenchman. Our word is cucumbers.

Finally, the order came for the advance. It was a dark night, but the marines could see their way forward well enough. The German bombardment had set fire to the railroad-station. The Americans kept in the shadows as much as they could, but they danced around so much that it was difficult. They placed their machine-guns here and there behind walls and new barricades, so that they could enfilade the approaches to the bridges and the streets on the opposite side of the river. One lieutenant with twelve men and two guns took up a position across the river. It was up to him to stand off the first rush.

The shelling from the enemy guns was intensified during the night, but the infantry had not yet reached the town. It was five o'clock of a bright morning when the little advance post of the Americans saw the Germans coming across the open field toward the river. They were marching along carelessly in two columns and there were twelve men in every line. One of the machine-guns swung her nose around a little and the fight was on. At last the American was definitely in one of the major engagements of the war. American machine-gunners were doing their bit to block the advance on Paris. All day long the marines held the Germans back with their machine-guns. And that night they beat back a German mass attack when the Boches came on and on in waves, with men locked arm in arm. They could hear them, for they sang as they rushed forward, and the machine-gunners pumped their bullets into the spots where the notes were loudest.

The next day the Americans were forced to give some ground when the order came to retire, but they had been through, perhaps, the most intensive two days of training which ever fell to the lot of green troops.

The marines did not have to wait long for retaliation. Other units of marines from other camps had been hurrying up to the front, and on June 6 an offensive was launched on a front of two and a half miles. The first day's gain was two and three-sixteenth miles and 100 prisoners were captured. This attack yielded all the important high ground northwest of Château-Thierry. The marines did not rest with this gain. They struck again at five o'clock in the afternoon, and by June 7 the attack had grown to much greater proportions. Four villages, Vinly, Veuilly-la-Poterie, Torcy, and Bouresches, fell into the hands of the French and Americans. The thrust was pressed to a maximum depth of two miles on a ten-mile front. More than 300 prisoners were captured by the Americans. The attack was carried out under American command, Major-General James G. Harbord being in charge of the operation.